A mini-slot-based cooperative MAC protocol for wireless mesh networks

This paper proposes a TDMA-based medium access control protocol with cooperative communications enabled in wireless mesh networks. The proposed scheme is based on a multi-hop scenario which is extended from the conventional one-hop triangle cooperative transmission scenario. Benefiting from the elaborate mini-slot design, channel resources are fairly and efficiently allocated to each router so that no handshake is needed prior to every packet transmission. By giving priority for channel access to cooperative transmission performed by an optimal helper which is determined based on the received SNR, higher successful transmission rate can be achieved. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed MAC scheme can improve not only the one-hop transmission throughput but also the end-to-end throughput significantly in a multi-hop network. Moreover, different from the IEEE 802.11 scheme, the throughput performance of the proposed scheme is robust as the packet size varies.